Just scanning the junk of America, the stories about cops killing a Down syndrome youth for going into a movie twice while paying once (come on, search it on Zion-Google), or all the dreadful creeps defending Breaking Wind (Bad) (oh, god, the Huffington-NBC-NYT-Time Magazine-drool turning this half-assed drugged-out show into high art, beware, Margaret Atwood), or all the sickos yammering about how Petraeus the puke deserves his $150,000 a year from one institution (princeTon) as an adjunct faculty (one class a semester at CUNY) and that any youth willing to protest that piece of Princeton polite killer deserves not just incarceration, but a beating and full-force of the rendition teams . . . or the stories about the rot at the top administrators, for instance, at U of Wisconsin Lacrosse, admonishing an assistant professor for sending an email about how the Republicans and Tea Baggers are holding a lot hostage with the failure to represent this country’s best interests, us, as the reason they even exist. This is our world, so degraded, so full of dead folk, the little Nazis and the Big Bad Barak Democrats, who give shit when old ladies like Dorli Rainey in Seattle get pepper-sprayed for protesting the bank Mafioso, the Coders and High Tech Mengeles, and the other pukes that launch Seattle’s finest felons in squad cars and black-on-black fatigues.

These are funny times, a socialist candidate for Seattle City Council jumping on the $15 an hour min. wage bandwagon, and fighting against, what, 17 percent cut in the city’s Metro Bus system? Funny felonious times, with the junk of Paul Allen, Jeff Bezos, Gates and Company, Boeing, Alaska Air, all the genetics and mind warping big players in that Seattle, and, again, cut after cut after cut.

Seattle, and Washington, never looking a tax rebate and tax loophole for the rich in the mouth. Cops in the metro sexual land, mean, racist, closet KKK, and, just plain weird, like those in Portland, Oregon, all tattooed up and sweaty smiles and that mean look. A mean look and surly disposition like a lot of men, stuck on their porn, stuck on their big boy sports, stuck in hate and muscle-madness, stuck on the endless desire to end all feminism, all humanities, anything that might interfere with clear-cutting, clear-channel takeover, clear and present danger.

They are the Champions singing with Freddy Mercury, unwittingly hating the very fiber of homosexuality.

What is it about America’s DNA, bloodline, the flood of mensa mutts going to sperm banks, looking for their 138 IQ smile in the mirror while donating, hoping that each and every little tig is their little image. Super-patriotic Anglo-Christian, or the self-denying Zionists, those unorthodox Jews who see their Jewishness as the power of sperm to move along little doggie. I am not kidding, and the wave of sperm and egg donors, or sex cells, is a testament to some really warped, messed up ideas about family, doing it alone, and the desire to have kids no matter what – sex cells, NYT.

Back to the cops — I’ve seen these punks while protesting Wells Fargo, while protesting the murder of Trayvon Williams, while marching in solidarity with May Day workers. Punks, and while I was helping Dennis Kucinich translate some shout outs to the the May Day marchers in Seattle, a few years ago, these punks with steroid-pumped imaginations, the cops, just wanted to man handle me, but I fed them my humanity and my father’s three eff-ing tours in Korea and Vietnam, saying, “Boys and girls, ya don’t got what it takes to be anything other than a radial tire kicker, sitting in front of computer in your V-8 propelled racist vehicle … Gold’s Gym punk pumping up those endorphins … playing your sadomasochism death metal blues … nothing but urban gang-bangers in blue!”

Milquetoast and Kombucha for Lunch

Hearing the Thom Hartmann I-am-a-Democrat show on Portland, Oregon’s “progressive radio station” as he apologizes to some caller for saying that real budget cuts and sequestration and shutting down the government – err, isn’t that treason, to shut down America, to hold Americans hostage, to attack the old, sick, infirm, weak, and poor – kills people? That’s what I heard him say, he said it, and then whimpered back into his Democratic Party-wallow and apologized, saying that was too harsh … and he just is another reason America has lobotomized all mettle and fabric in our collective death.

What a sham, these media middling types, the Moguls in the infomercial world of faux-news, controlling the entire narrative of us, the average people. What jellyfish spines we have become, afraid-afraid-afraid to take a stand, to fight against the fondlers of sanity, and they smile all the way to the bank. The stuff coming from Zionists, faux Jews, Crypto Christians and sad sack capitalists is beyond absurd, silly, sick. These fellows are the reason why sanity is lost in America.

It’s all coming to me, after taking care of adults with developmental disabilities who are plugged into old movies and newer ones, lots of television, and sports, and they are less challenged than the average yokel in Yanqui-land who has bought hook (-er), line (of credit) and sinker (sinking into debt) the big metaphorical big score in la-la land. These folk have excuses, histories, challenges they are overcoming. The Georgetown, Smith College, Stanford punks have no excuses for their ignorance and their usury. They are rabid and afraid and flailing pansies. With guns, with nukes, with entire countries shoveled-over for their resource stealing and their despot propping.

They watch Mayberry RFD and then the news with Obama, my fine folk with fetal alcohol syndrome, mild retardation (not PC, intellectual disability is the term), mild schizophrenia, Autism, Fragile X, and on and on. All those challenges the pigs on the Beltway want to cut, dice and leave in the gutter – just that giant sucking sound of the CEO’s salary at Walmart, in ONE year, would take a worker, err, 785 years to make. We live in Dickensian times, rotten abusive times when hipsters and republicans laugh at the homeless and curse street corner folk asking for a buck to make their day or thank their god, while they pay hand over fist for the rip-off of IRS, Verizon, i-Punk, tariff after depleted uranium tax to make this country’s soul smolder under the ashes of the countries we fry for the benefit of Wal-Shell-BP-Raytheon-Monsanto-Goldman-Sachs thuggery. These clients talk about al Qaeda, about Syria, about the fearsome hordes of people over there who want our way of life. Instantaneous amazement, how the old guys consume TV and the MSNBC and local bubble brains on the local follies of news reports. But, then, it is boob tube universal, the great manipulator, a reason to sell soap and opera. Lies designed to kill the soul of a country. These are children of disabilities, the developmental challenges that are recognized by state and country, now programs on the chopping block while these metro sexuals, hipsters, generals, the Goldman and the Sachs sucking the life out of entire cities, yes, they consume and drill through America’s bedrock looking for the goo of gazillion millions. And, then, over there, on the so-called normal scale, those without developmental disabilities, those who run businesses, go to work, love the benefits of lording over the, the people with DD, well, they are amassing as horses asses, and they love the feedback loop of their bantering, their hate email, their hateful people in the news, from Bob Schieffer to Sean Hannity; from the latest sad-sack with the Washington glow.

Sting Like a Butterfly, Flop Like Colony Collapse

Facing Ali, the great documentary of the heavyweights who faced this icon, this black man who never ever bowed to the Christian-Judea jinx-junk of a society that profits on the backs of the artists, the graceful ones, the pure geniuses like Spinks, Holmes, Liston, Frazier, Shavers, Foreman, the white guys, too, who were hosed down by the middle men, the agents and the promoters, the ones with no guts, no heart, no creative muse, but with the gift of money licking, the gift of contracts and bilking and ripping off the dancers of the fight.

You know these bankrupting experts need no more than two seconds in the ring with these greats. Now that’s comeuppance. If only, if only, Watch Facing Ali and understand the struggle, the real art of athletes, the value in that time period, and resisting, like Unforgivable Blackness Jack Johnson!

Facing Ali is many of us, facing the world, fighting for his humanness, his humane side, the very pugnacious side, the theatrics, the ever-circus nature of the boxing game in the ’60s through late ’70s. Today, we have steroid and blood doped athletes, million-dollar cologne hucksters, million-dollar Red Bull fake men and women shilling for more decals on their designer jump suits.

Nothing like it today in this weasel world of redneck reality and Stewart-Leibowitz deadpan daily-daily shows of nihilism, poking fun all the way to the stockholders’ meeting. We are a neutered society of aggressive Blackhawk gunships, mean hummer-driving pedestrian killers, a world of football-talking ladies moving from one fat fellow’s lap to the poor fat dog wagging its Kibbles and Bits tail as more of the little pudgy child’s Lucky Charms end up on the Swiffer-smeared floor.

You can’t make this up, the Dystopia created by elite Beltway Bums, K-street syphilitics, WTO, WB, trans-financial warped lives of hotel maid-raping French kingpins of money laundering, how they let their spleen juice flow into us, the lower classes. Their blitzkrieg against the working class is their game, their fun, to the point where we, the prisoners of capital, end up watching this abusive species of the sub-subterranean kind get shows on the black screen of TV that are about their simple-mindedness, their power to be The Boss, to boot off pathetic young and old believers in the power of money to transform themselves from empty dryer scented philistines into double-breasted apes with stocks and bonds. They lick Trump’s soles for a coin.

You Are What You Watch — Consumption, TV, Obesity of the Mind

Think about the ghettoization of the mind through the conveyor belt of junk consumed at both ends of the human spectrum. The drooling masses all perfumed up with bubblegum scents, donning their advertising t-shirts or hoodies. It’s a perfect Zionist liberal script of cultural and intellectual cleansing, as if Spielberg and the Weinstein Brothers are ARTISTS, flopping around with a Mad Max 21st Century style world of metro-sexual shoppers at the top, pushing codes into cyber-sphere, pushing a world of constant updating, downloading, death claiming floating nothingness – complete security, complete transactions, complete big brother – into the daily lives of people who would and should know better.

I am thinking about my days teaching in prisons, running through the highlands of Guatemala, or those 250-foot dives outside the Palancar Reef. Those $800,000 quarter- races in Chihuahua with judges, narcs, federal police, mayors, governors and a whole lot of drug runners. Thinking about 14-year-olds from Salvador hoofing it to the US-Mexico border, crossing and dodging Nazi Border Patrol who have trigger fingers and a lust for bruising and throwing down on victims. Thinking about the 13 bloated bodies left in the desert by more small-time usury hoodlums seeking coins for a child’s one chance to leave the death-squads of America’s School, the School of the Assassins, the Academy of Rapes, the College of Raze and Burn, the University of Death. DoD, USA, NSA, FBI, CIA, BP, USAF, Psy-Ops, the million-dollar club of Army-Navy-Air Force-Marines felons and misanthropy. All dolled up on golf courses, laughing hyenas of generals and government contractors, all the minions carrying the clubs and spit shining boss-man’s shoes.

I am thinking how rotten the generals are, how obscene the former war-makers are, like McCain, F-4 Phantom spray of village, spray of orphanage, his little top gun moment all armed-up, double loads of napalm, white phosphorus, the Gatling gun trigger laughing all the way into the green haze of Vietnam, wrenched from fat steak meals, pulled away from McCain’s prostitute gathering, big bourbon nights while lurking through the shadows of his sickness as fly-boy.

Shoot Anything That Moves, Dances, Sits, and Lies Down — US Military-Copland

MAM – military aged males, anyone running through a rice paddy, gathering sticks for tea pot fires, any kid fleet of foot. Colin Rotten Powell, major in Vietnam, his pre-Niger yellow-cake follies in Indochina, working up a career lust of pushing pilots and gunners to pelt 12-year-olds, any age outside of diapers, with bombs, bullets and chemical payloads brought to them by GE, Dow DuPont, Corning, Mattel, the entire US of A’s empire fleet of pudgy-fingered rot.

Powell, who also was tasked (and with pure patriotic delight) to discredit a few heroes who unmasked the rape-rapine-immolation of My Lai. His destiny, old Powell, rotting inside, rotten outside. Smiling at those $125,000-a-shot-TED talks. He and Madeline Albright, Clinton, Liddy, Ollie Golly North. Can you imagine a conversation with Powell the aspiring LTC, and Ali, the hero of all times? Right. Another general hiding behind the waist of mamacita.

All fanciful board members of Walmart-Gates-Melinda-Amazon-School of the Privatizing Insults.

I am thinking about the ones I taught at the Sergeants Major Academy from all branches of service and many countries, and thinking about prison guards when I was teaching, and prison guards when I was thrown in jail for doing the Paul Revere, anti-King George things of protestation, puking up the faux patriotism of follow-the-leader. Thrown down by big muscle-bound pukes who tossed me in the gutter for daring to challenge the anti-Planned Parenthood folk attacking Saturday clinics.

I remember punks from El Paso police, local yokels at the college, who throat-whacked young women and guys all lined up in a human chain just to protest the galloping horses with deputies all dressed up like Conquistadors while parading on the UT-El Paso campus. One small step for youth and agency to stop the president’s insane love of military, of the lies of Columbus, and of the cops flailing, hitting hard, calling us names, the only sane ones that day spitting on the graves of riders of death, 500 years after Columbus cut blood out of the earth for his queen, his fears, his zombie priests, his gold-lusting rapists in uniform, carrying gun powder and the sign of Jesus.

These people, these generals, are the walking dead, and they have little regard for Americans, and their patriotism is locked in their guns, hardware and anti-American lust for guys in jets, guys climbing over obstacle courses, and guys ordering around the masses at boot camp. The generals, the colonels, all one-one hundredth the men and women walking the streets daily just there to try and survive.

I am thinking about those guys who threw me down to the ground as a 17-year-old wrestler and motorcycle kid. On the side of the road in Arizona, guns drawn and pointed at my head for being a high school senior, a mop head, and a couple of tickets levied against me for driving a loud Husky 350 cc through back roads and side streets. No helmet, no insurance, not license — .357 magnum and .38 Special pointed at my ears.

I remember all those cops I had to talk to as police beat reporter. All those military midgets who were MPs and border patrol freaks who just couldn’t wait for some head-bashing fun in the sun, or in some little alley out of the way, out of the glare of the citizenry they laughingly believed they were contracted to respect and protect.

We are doomed, the black hawk down junk of aliens and Riddley Scott, in cahoots with Hollywood and DoD, giving us grand shots of the war ships of cultural and community rape, all paid for by you, me, granny and seven generations away from our own deaths.

Hollywood, 60 Minutes and Endless Smirking Blonde and Bald Chimps

Nothing in Hollywood smells right, nothing, it seems, pureed by NPR-loving liberals, put into the blender of smoothie art, music, drama, none of it is real, or stands on its own as struggle, none of it, as “real creator” of art, just another braying careerist, conservative in most ways, with a glimmer in the eye for queer eye for the straight guy – har-har-har. But nothing, really, just manicured minds, the potent DNA morphing of urban tribes chanting on facebook. Self-censoring, because the Man, the Corporation, the Deans and Chancellors, the head pukes at Amazon dot com, former military midgets, yelling, cursing, while Jeff Bezos Zionist zombie laughs all the way to the digital bank. Imagine, a few pugnacious fools in Germany demanding higher wages at the Amazon junk warehouses. Imagine, the rotten Princeton graduate Bezos and his military managers braying, “It’s What the Market Will, Should, Can, and Must Bear.”

Teachers fired for speaking, for showing, for being. Teachers on the run, and the cops waylay the masses, their swat SWAT masks, their double lined assault vehicles, they are the tools of Cheney, or Biden, of Koch, of the massive APAIC machine. Cops, generals, and the fools in Hollywood and on Madison Avenue who sell the lies of America, the good wars, the realness of collateral damage. What a rotten shame, this Obama, would be, if and only if MLK or Ali were around. Mark Twain. George Bernard Shaw. Gertrude Stein, anyone with a backbone, something that isn’t holographs, nothing that is photo-shopped into a glorified pornography tape of the men and women in uniform . . . the castrating tools of Big USA and Trans-Pacific Partners. What a sad day in heaven, with jack-booted libertarians, fascists running around Greece, the death of a colonel, gone, left for the ravens of war. These generalísimos are the rot at the top, and we have to sit here, listen to the lies and the two-bit dramas in Hollywood or brought to us by Lexus.

I like what John Steppling has to say in his work, this one titled, “Crimes”:

I was trying to think after last posting, about the way in which crime stories hold our attention. Or why they have such durability. And then I wanted to look more at why 99% of Hollywood film and TV is both junk, AND violent, and about crime. Why do some films or TV capture a sense of our basic trauma, or the bedrock suffering that life in this society entails? And why are others just melodrama or violence porn? Maybe my question is more, why are Indi films, reactions to excessive violence and self consciously liberal, almost always so bad? If you look at a French television crime series, Engrenages (Spiral in English), one quite honestly does not feel the narrative is upholding the status quo. Now, perhaps it is, and I’ve only watched one season, actually not even a whole season, but the sense is one of existential pain. I find Danish crime series to exhibit the same cold ambivalence about authority. There is little self pity in a lot of these European shows, and rarely is the violence anything other than destructive. But I point this out because in the US, the default setting for drama is really melodrama. And melodrama as you find it in Hollywood, is actually far more dishonest than the cop franchises. The melodrama you find in theater, in major New York theaters, or Broadway, or big flagship theaters throughout the country, is far more dishonest then even Bochco or Dick Wolff. It is worse because suddenly, without the genre conventions, without the violence act, the narrative retreats (of necessity in a sense) further behind the generalized moralizing of the liberal white class that consumes culture in the first place. These generalizations are prescriptive. They lecture and chide and the most prevalent idea at work in these narratives is that of responsibility. As the society feels ever less powerful, with ever less agency and purpose, the trumpeting of responsibility grows ever louder.

This class cannot wrap its mind around what daily life is like in Kenya, or in Somalia, or in Eritrea or Burundi. Or in Algeria or Libya or in the Philippines.

But what does this have to do with political theater? The tearing down and bulldozing of slum dwellings in Nairobi, by the Kenyan army (and foreign advisers) reflects the tearing down of the 9th ward in New Orleans after Katrina, and it reflects the raising of Palestinian villages by the IDF. It resembles the forced movement of poor populations around the globe. The segregation of undesirables, or a surplus work force for whom there are no jobs, is becoming the new normal. Look at Detroit. Look at Gary, Indiana, or El Paso, or Port Au Prince or Lagos. The point is that state power is directed by the Imperial power, the U.S.A. The war is not on terror, it’s on the poor.

US corporate melodrama, and one sees this expressed in Independent film {sic} even more clearly: the so called alternative culture is even more repressed, more amnesiac. The white male patriarchy is replaced by soft male patriarchy. Soft and sort of icky, to be honest. Its what Bly used to call the Health Food Co Op passivity. Into this world the unconscious never travels. It is a cleansed world of mostly white problems, and if actual social issues do arise (and they do often enough, in theory) then the narrative expression is one of bathos. It is sentimentalized, and the sentimental is always a violence against the text.

Poems with force

The Colonel

Carolyn Forché

What you have heard is true. I was in his house.
His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His
daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the
night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol
on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on
its black cord over the house. On the television
was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles
were embedded in the walls around the house to
scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs or cut his
hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings
like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of
lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for
calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes,
salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed
the country. There was a brief commercial in
Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was
some talk of how difficult it had become to govern.
The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel
told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the
table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say
nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to
bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on
the table. They were like dried peach halves. There
is no other way to say this. He took one of them in
his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a
water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of
fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone,
tell your people they can go f— themselves. He
swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held
the last of his wine in the air. Something for your
poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor
caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on
the floor were pressed to the ground.

May 1978

The War Works Hard

by Dunya Mikhail
translated by Elizabeth Winslow

How magnificent the war is!
How eager
and efficient!
Early in the morning
it wakes up the sirens
and dispatches ambulances
to various places
swings corpses through the air
rolls stretchers to the wounded
summons rain
from the eyes of mothers
digs into the earth
dislodging many things
from under the ruins…

Some are lifeless and glistening
others are pale and still throbbing…
It produces the most questions
in the minds of children
entertains the gods
by shooting fireworks and missiles
into the sky
sows mines in the fields
and reaps punctures and blisters
urges families to emigrate
stands beside the clergymen
as they curse the devil
(poor devil, he remains
with one hand in the searing fire)…

The war continues working, day and night.
It inspires tyrants
to deliver long speeches
awards medals to generals
and themes to poets
it contributes to the industry
of artificial limbs
provides food for flies
adds pages to the history books
achieves equality
between killer and killed
teaches lovers to write letters
accustoms young women to waiting
fills the newspapers
with articles and pictures
builds new houses
for the orphans
invigorates the coffin makers
gives grave diggers
a pat on the back
and paints a smile on the leader’s face.

It works with unparalleled diligence!
Yet no one gives it
a word of praise.

Memorial Day for the War Dead

by Yehuda Amichai

Memorial day for the war dead. Add now
the grief of all your losses to their grief,
even of a woman that has left you. Mix
sorrow with sorrow, like time-saving history,
which stacks holiday and sacrifice and mourning
on one day for easy, convenient memory.

Oh, sweet world soaked, like bread,
in sweet milk for the terrible toothless God.
“Behind all this some great happiness is hiding.”
No use to weep inside and to scream outside.
Behind all this perhaps some great happiness is hiding.

Memorial day. Bitter salt is dressed up
as a little girl with flowers.
The streets are cordoned off with ropes,
for the marching together of the living and the dead.
Children with a grief not their own march slowly,
like stepping over broken glass.

The flautist’s mouth will stay like that for many days.
A dead soldier swims above little heads
with the swimming movements of the dead,
with the ancient error the dead have
about the place of the living water.

A flag loses contact with reality and flies off.
A shopwindow is decorated with
dresses of beautiful women, in blue and white.
And everything in three languages:
Hebrew, Arabic, and Death.

A great and royal animal is dying
all through the night under the jasmine
tree with a constant stare at the world.

A man whose son died in the war walks in the street
like a woman with a dead embryo in her womb.
“Behind all this some great happiness is hiding.”

The People

By Pablo Neruda

Tweet I recall that man and not two centuries
have passed since I saw him,
he went neither by horse nor by carriage:
purely on foot
he outstripped
distances,
and carried no sword or armour,
only nets on his shoulder,
ax or hammer or spade,
never fighting the rest of his species:
his exploits were with water and earth,
with wheat so that it turned into bread,
with giant trees to render them wood,
with walls to open up doors,
with sand to construct the walls,
and with ocean for it to bear.

I knew him and he is still not cancelled in me.

The carriages fell to pieces,
war destroyed doors and walls,
the city was a handful of ashes,
all the clothes turned to dust,
and he remains to me,
he survives in the sand,
when everything before
seemed imperishable but him.

In the going and coming of families
at times he was my father or kinsman
or perhaps it was scarcely him or not
the one who did not return to his house
because water or earth swallowed him up
or a tree or an engine killed him,
or he was the saddened carpenter
who went behind the coffin, without tears,
someone in the end who had no name,
except those that metal or timber have,
and on whom others gazed from on high
without seeing the ant
for the anthill
and so that when his feet did not stir,
because the poor exhausted one had died,
they never saw what they had not seen:
already there were other feet where he’d been.

The other feet were still his,
and the other hands,
the man remained:
when it seemed that now he was done for
he was the same once more,
there he was digging again at the earth,
cutting cloth, minus a shirt,
there he was and was not, like before,
he had gone down and was once more,
and since he never owned graveyards,
or tombs, nor was his name carved
on the stone he sweated to quarry,
no one knew he had come
and no one knew when he died,
so that only when the poor man could
he returned to life once more, without it being noted.

He was the man, no doubt of it, without heritage,
without cattle, without a flag,
and he was not distinguished from others,
the others who were him,
from the heights he was grey like the subsoil,
tanned like the leather,
he was yellow reaping the wheat,
he was black down in the mine,
he was the colour of stone on the fortress,
in the fishing boat the colour of tuna,
and the colour of horses in the meadow:
how could anyone distinguish him
if he was inseparable, elemental,
earth, coal or sea vested in man?

Where he lived whatever
a man touched grew:
the hostile stones,
quarried
by his hands,
took on order
and one by one formed
the right clarity of a building,
he made bread with his hands,
moved the engines,
the distances peopled themselves with towns,
other men grew,
bees arrived,
and by man’s creating and breeding
spring walked the market squares
between bakeries and doves.

The maker of loaves was forgotten,
he who quarried and journeyed, beating down
and opening furrows, transporting sand,
when everything existed he no longer existed,
he gave his existence, that’s all.
He went elsewhere to labour, and at last
he was dead, rolling
like a stone in the river:
death carried him downstream.

I, who knew him, saw him descend
till he was no longer except what he left:
roads he could scarcely know,
houses he never ever would live in.

I turn to see him, and I await him

I see him in his grave and resurrected.

I distinguish him among all
who are his equals
and it seems to me it cannot be,
that like this we go nowhere,
that to survive like this holds no glory.

I believe that this man
must be enthroned, rightly shod and crowned.
I believe that those who made such things
must be the masters of all these things.
And that those who made bread should eat!

And those in the mines must have light!
Enough now of grey men enslaved!
Enough of the pale ‘missing ones’!
Not another man passes except as a king.
Not a single woman without her crown.
Golden gauntlets for every hand.
Fruits of the sun for all the unknowns!
I knew that man and when I could,
when he still had eyes in his head,
when he still had a voice in his mouth
I searched for him among tombs, and I said
grasping his arm that was not yet dust:
‘All will be gone, you will live on,
You ignite life.
You made what is yours.’

So let no one trouble themselves when
I seem to be alone and am not alone,
I am with no one and speak for them all:

Some listen to me, without knowing,
but those I sing, those who do know
go on being born, and will fill up the Earth.

Paul Kirk has been a journalist since 1977. He's covered police, environment, planning and zoning, county and city politics, as well as working in true small town/community journalism situations in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Mexico and beyond. He's been a part-time faculty since 1983, and as such has worked in prisons, gang-influenced programs, universities, colleges, alternative high schools, language schools, as a private contractor-writing instructor for US military in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Washington. Read other articles by Paul.